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Adam Osborne on Product Release Brinkmanship

I just left a comment on John Jantsch’s excellent Duct Tape Marketing blog, an interesting post titled Sometimes You’ve Got to Burn the Boats. John is recommending building brinkmanship deadlines into your marketing *gulp*. I’ve done it but I don’t want to write about it. It’s something like managing to make it across a rickety burning falling bridge — you don’t want to call back to others to follow you, for fear of watching them not make it and fall.

What I do want to write about is the late Adam Osborne, founder of Osborne Computers, writer, columnist, and inspiration to a generation of computer writers turned entrepreneurs.

I had the privilege of dealing with Adam Osborne a few times during the early Silicon Valley days. Two of his sayings come to mind:

"Adequate is good enough," he said, more than once. He was talking about product development and technology business. "Ship it."

He also espoused what he liked to call the Adam Osborne Trade Show Theory of Productivity, which was, in detail: "80% of the GDP is finished the night before the trade show opens."